I wrote out a variety of replies but I just emphatically agree with your "lack of imagination" statement. I have been constantly surprised over the last 15 years at the general inability to correctly foresee how things can do wrong across a whole host of domains.
The replies here just adds AI to the list of domains.
The intro paragraphs talking about the mental disengagement or decline or whatever we want to call it really resonated with me. It's something I've also taken measures to counter. In fact I'm on vacation right now to Basque Country. I read "A Basque History of the World" to prepare for the trip and that act reassured me I'm not getting less capable of engaging intellectually, I just have different intellectual interests now than the most intimate details of making websites for and serving them to customers at varying scales.
Your last two sentences remind me of the olden days of people building applications on top of FB and Twitter APIs (and later, Reddit), only to to have the rug pulled out from under them in one way or another
Olden days being FB and Twitter APIs? Don't forget about Apple Sherlocking independent devs. This has been happening with almost any platform for a very long time.
Back in the day, a contract company I worked for had entire teams of people dedicated to building FB apps. When that collapsed, it came down fast and hard.
even before that, by some accounts I hear the reason VCs over invested in dot com was primarily because they saw something that could not easily usurped by Microsoft by releasing their own sh*tty copy. so they all piled in and then bubble dynamics took over.